Personalities
Virginia is for Readers
Costumes, manuscripts, and really big hats: Claire Miccio goes to the Virginia Woolf Conference and meets the Trekkies of Mrs. Dalloway.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Better Baby Names Bureau (The Non-Expert)
- This Is Not a Eulogy (Profiles)
- The Vanishing Date (Spoofs & Satire)
Also by Claire Miccio
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- Personagem: Talking With Arto Lindsay (June 9, 2005)
- The GTA Crunk: Props from a Self-Skooled Rapologist (June 7, 2005)
- Birnbaum v. Kevin Guilfoile (May 24, 2005)
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Wednesday, June 4, 2003
When I told a friend that I would be attending the Virginia Woolf Conference he wanted to know if that was gonna be a whole bunch of Woolf lunatics dressed up like the figures from her life and characters from her novels greeting each other with popular lines and quizzing each other on obscure passages. Something like a WoolfCon 2003! if you will. I had to break it to him that this would be an academic conference, not a convention, and most certainly not a Con.
Yet, when I enter the registration line at the Laura Scales house , I can’t help but wish that some member of the Virginia Woolf Role Playing Society – a loopy old lady with a wide-brimmed hat and a touch of the bird might burst through the doorway pertly chirping, ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ and walk away the assured top gun for this year’s ‘Best Clarissa Dalloway.’
I guess if I had to be any Virginia Woolf character or figure from her life, I’d be either Vita Sackville-West or Lily Briscoe from To the Lighthouse: Vita because she was just so out there – smart, adventurous, sexual, and entirely on the fringe – and Lily Briscoe because she brings everyone in the novel together. If I get to be in a novel as remarkable as that, I’m sure as shit gonna choose to be a cog and not a wheel.
At registration they supply me with a nifty packet containing various thingies for the upcoming week, most and least importantly my nametag. It’s kinda snazzy – my name and institution in a serif font standing proudly beneath the conference logo, the whole of it coated in plastic, and clasped proudly to my dress. Wearing it I feel silly but reading it I feel like I’m more scholar than student. Really, I’m just lucky.
I wonder if I look as wide-eyed as I feel.
Thursday, June 5, 2003
‘Virginia Woolf in the World: A Pen and Press of Her Own’ is a large exhibition outside the recent-periodical room displaying letters, original manuscripts and typescripts, first editions, books from Hogarth Press, photographs, Bloomsbury iconography, and Robert Browning’s writing desk.
I like the letters, original book covers, and photographs the most. Woolf had scratchy, difficult handwriting but then again she had scratchy, difficult tools to work with. I saw some of her pens, and two years of clerking at a stationery store has made me well aware of the difference between uncapping a Pilot pen and dipping a speedball nib in ink: It’s a choice between hearing yourself think and hearing yourself write.
The Hogarth Press books are exciting to see. The first British edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland gives me a jolt. It’s one of only 460 copies, and has a handmade cover that looks like steamrolled blue fish eggs. There are also the original Sixpenny Pamphlets to see, with their brief, slightly esoteric arguments by writers like E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey.
Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, created the artwork for nearly all the first-edition book jackets. Her stuff has a sloppy but graphic quality, with thick fonts, bold fudgy lines, and no overt visual direction. It’s all very flat with modest, lusterless colors and I like them tremendously – Jacob’s Room and The Waves especially.
My favorite portrait of Virginia is here, in a case with her and Leonard’s engagement photo and a letter alerting Lytton Strachey of their upcoming marriage. (Lytton had proposed to Virginia earlier, only to rescind his offer and later get involved with the young artist Dora Carrington, all the while being openly gay.) The portrait is a photograph from 1902 by George Beresford when Virginia was exactly my age right now and still a Stephen, not yet having married Leonard Woolf.
It’s an exquisite photograph, capturing her profile as she looks off, most likely thinking (we’ll just say). It’s very Julia Margaret Cameron in the positioning but very Imogen Cunningham in the effect. Smooth, white bed sheets tucked under her jaw, opalescent in natural light. Eyes softly considering, maybe something she’d seen that day, a beauty that wants a few words.
I don’t fool myself that she was a nice person. She was a self-professed snob, one who would tear you down so long as you weren’t in the room. And yet, looking at her face, I’m reminded of how horribly inferior she often felt and that she stabbed herself with the exact same knife she plunged at others. I too know that old act.
Friday, June 6, 2003
After a full day of sessions – ‘The Hogarth Press,’ ‘The Biographical Woolf,’ and ‘Woolf’s Influence on Sylvia Plath’ – I’m partly exhausted, mostly thrilled, and somewhat assured that grad school in English Lit is not the place for me. My interest in reading and writing sits elsewhere, I’m just not sure where that is. Truthfully, I think I want to be a translator – or maybe a La Scala stagehand. Any way I go I’m sure I’ll still get the ineffable experience of eating tomato soup made from McDonald’s ketchup packets and tap water.
I learn that Smith used to have a ‘closed-marks’ system, meaning they did not disclose the grades to students so as to keep them motivated and to prevent, I guess, injurious competition. Apparently they quit that method because students were frequently breaking down due to hyper-studying.
But I don’t think I would freak out. I see it as a relief to know that you are doing your best without knowing that your very best pales pathetically in comparison to the girl you sit next to in class. Of course, the girl thinks it’s ruinous to learn scansion, keeps bringing up Ani DiFranco lyrics in your Contemporary Poetry class, and thinks the English department ought to be revamped into ‘Cultural Studies.’
Last night Jill Ker Conway, who I admire deeply, gave a plenary session on ‘Virginia Woolf and Education.’ Both Virginia and her sister, because they were girls, were never formally educated but given full access to their father’s extensive library, an option rarely afforded to women in the late-nineteenth century. This, however, did little to mitigate Woolf’s exasperation after watching her brothers trot happily off to Cambridge and Oxford. Conway proposed that Woolf’s feelings of inferiority – well documented in her journals and letters – surface in her work as controlled anger, and are an invaluable part of its enduring effect.
This suggestion doesn’t shock me. What shocks me is the way Woolf has the ability to make it all so funny. A Room of One’s Own is a non-stop sarcastic metafiction that you can’t help but giggle through. But when you think of its ultimate argument – that women suffer unnecessarily from a lack of access – your laughter freezes uneasy in the air and you become acutely aware of how unfunny and justifiable her anger is.
Saturday, June 7, 2003
The most remarkable moment of the conference occurred this morning during Lyndall Gordon’s plenary session, entitled ‘This Loose Drifting Material of Life: Virginia Woolf and Biography.’ Gordon, a renowned biographer, discussed with a great deal of wit and humor the discrepancies in writing biography and the choices biographers must make with the knowledge that they will never be able to know the whole truth and therefore never be able to tell it.
The very issue of knowing humanity was big for Woolf as well. To me, that is what runs beneath all her novels, essays, diaries, and letters – how do we know someone and how do we know life? It would seem that life ends with death but, as Gordon said, ‘That really remains to be seen.’
I wish that Woolf had traveled more often than she did, which was really almost not at all: a few trips to Venice, a trip to Wales. She had every reason to travel; she had the means and opportunity yet she lacked the desire to ever leave London. Of all the modernist writers she was without a doubt the most insular, and it had its effects on her writing – although I cannot support whether they were for better or worse. But just think: If her one trip to Wales could inspire a story as moving as To the Lighthouse, imagine what stories she might have produced as a world traveler.
Next on the itinerary for today is Lyman Conservatory for a botanical perspective on Woolf: namely Kew Gardens and Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst.
Last night one of the members of the Virginia Woolf Society came to dinner dressed as Sally Seton from Mrs. Dalloway. Her iridescent mauve dress was fabulous, but I wasn’t sure if the gigantic pink ribbon bowed around her head was for decor or nursing a head wound. Nonetheless she’s a potential delegate for WoolfCon 2004!
Sunday, June 8, 2003
Last night I met Hermione Lee, Woolf’s greatest biographer. She’s quite charming and much more normal than I expected. After all, it’s no secret that Virginia Woolf attracts more than her fair share of kooks.
This afternoon I got the chance to stand directly in front of Woolf’s writing desk. It’s part of the ‘Vanessa Bell and Bloomsbury’ exhibit in the art museum. The top surface of the desk bears an image of Clio, the muse of history, as painted by Virginia’s nephew, Quentin Bell. Beside the portrait remain countless deep grooves and ink splotches, perhaps the leftovers from many days into evenings of writing.
The conference sessions concluded this afternoon and I am, for the most part, glad. There is only so much of any author, even a beloved one, that I can stomach. Writer-conference worst nightmare: Nathaniel Hawthorne or anything having to do with Transcendentalism. Or, dear god – Tennyson!
So then what makes Woolf a writer-conference fantasy? For one, she’s not very easy to read – she’s not inaccessible by any stroke of the pen – but she makes you work hard, which makes the results that much more rewarding. But the greatest reason, for me at least, is because you can never be done with her. With metaphors that are never one-to-one ratios and a style that reads like a mind’s eye rendering the world, you don’t wish to be done either. T.S. Eliot describes her writing as ‘the dislocation of language into meaning.’ I figure it’s even simpler than that though.
For dinner tonight I had cereal and tea, rather a jump from the ‘Boeuf en Daube’ conference dinner modeled after the famous meal from To the Lighthouse. Most delegates are probably still on planes, waiting to arrive home after five days of thinking, reading, and talking nothing but Virginia Woolf. Not me, though: It’s so nice to have a sublet just down the street from campus. It’s also nice to be thinking and reading something besides Woolf tonight before bed.
Although I’m sure something or other of hers will find its way to my nightstand in no time at all.
When I told a friend that I would be attending the Virginia Woolf Conference he wanted to know if that was gonna be a whole bunch of Woolf lunatics dressed up like the figures from her life and characters from her novels greeting each other with popular lines and quizzing each other on obscure passages. Something like a WoolfCon 2003! if you will. I had to break it to him that this would be an academic conference, not a convention, and most certainly not a Con.
Yet, when I enter the registration line at the Laura Scales house , I can’t help but wish that some member of the Virginia Woolf Role Playing Society – a loopy old lady with a wide-brimmed hat and a touch of the bird might burst through the doorway pertly chirping, ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ and walk away the assured top gun for this year’s ‘Best Clarissa Dalloway.’
I guess if I had to be any Virginia Woolf character or figure from her life, I’d be either Vita Sackville-West or Lily Briscoe from To the Lighthouse: Vita because she was just so out there – smart, adventurous, sexual, and entirely on the fringe – and Lily Briscoe because she brings everyone in the novel together. If I get to be in a novel as remarkable as that, I’m sure as shit gonna choose to be a cog and not a wheel.
At registration they supply me with a nifty packet containing various thingies for the upcoming week, most and least importantly my nametag. It’s kinda snazzy – my name and institution in a serif font standing proudly beneath the conference logo, the whole of it coated in plastic, and clasped proudly to my dress. Wearing it I feel silly but reading it I feel like I’m more scholar than student. Really, I’m just lucky.
I wonder if I look as wide-eyed as I feel.
Thursday, June 5, 2003
‘Virginia Woolf in the World: A Pen and Press of Her Own’ is a large exhibition outside the recent-periodical room displaying letters, original manuscripts and typescripts, first editions, books from Hogarth Press, photographs, Bloomsbury iconography, and Robert Browning’s writing desk.
I like the letters, original book covers, and photographs the most. Woolf had scratchy, difficult handwriting but then again she had scratchy, difficult tools to work with. I saw some of her pens, and two years of clerking at a stationery store has made me well aware of the difference between uncapping a Pilot pen and dipping a speedball nib in ink: It’s a choice between hearing yourself think and hearing yourself write.
The Hogarth Press books are exciting to see. The first British edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland gives me a jolt. It’s one of only 460 copies, and has a handmade cover that looks like steamrolled blue fish eggs. There are also the original Sixpenny Pamphlets to see, with their brief, slightly esoteric arguments by writers like E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey.
Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, created the artwork for nearly all the first-edition book jackets. Her stuff has a sloppy but graphic quality, with thick fonts, bold fudgy lines, and no overt visual direction. It’s all very flat with modest, lusterless colors and I like them tremendously – Jacob’s Room and The Waves especially.
My favorite portrait of Virginia is here, in a case with her and Leonard’s engagement photo and a letter alerting Lytton Strachey of their upcoming marriage. (Lytton had proposed to Virginia earlier, only to rescind his offer and later get involved with the young artist Dora Carrington, all the while being openly gay.) The portrait is a photograph from 1902 by George Beresford when Virginia was exactly my age right now and still a Stephen, not yet having married Leonard Woolf.
It’s an exquisite photograph, capturing her profile as she looks off, most likely thinking (we’ll just say). It’s very Julia Margaret Cameron in the positioning but very Imogen Cunningham in the effect. Smooth, white bed sheets tucked under her jaw, opalescent in natural light. Eyes softly considering, maybe something she’d seen that day, a beauty that wants a few words.
I don’t fool myself that she was a nice person. She was a self-professed snob, one who would tear you down so long as you weren’t in the room. And yet, looking at her face, I’m reminded of how horribly inferior she often felt and that she stabbed herself with the exact same knife she plunged at others. I too know that old act.
Friday, June 6, 2003
After a full day of sessions – ‘The Hogarth Press,’ ‘The Biographical Woolf,’ and ‘Woolf’s Influence on Sylvia Plath’ – I’m partly exhausted, mostly thrilled, and somewhat assured that grad school in English Lit is not the place for me. My interest in reading and writing sits elsewhere, I’m just not sure where that is. Truthfully, I think I want to be a translator – or maybe a La Scala stagehand. Any way I go I’m sure I’ll still get the ineffable experience of eating tomato soup made from McDonald’s ketchup packets and tap water.
I learn that Smith used to have a ‘closed-marks’ system, meaning they did not disclose the grades to students so as to keep them motivated and to prevent, I guess, injurious competition. Apparently they quit that method because students were frequently breaking down due to hyper-studying.
But I don’t think I would freak out. I see it as a relief to know that you are doing your best without knowing that your very best pales pathetically in comparison to the girl you sit next to in class. Of course, the girl thinks it’s ruinous to learn scansion, keeps bringing up Ani DiFranco lyrics in your Contemporary Poetry class, and thinks the English department ought to be revamped into ‘Cultural Studies.’
Last night Jill Ker Conway, who I admire deeply, gave a plenary session on ‘Virginia Woolf and Education.’ Both Virginia and her sister, because they were girls, were never formally educated but given full access to their father’s extensive library, an option rarely afforded to women in the late-nineteenth century. This, however, did little to mitigate Woolf’s exasperation after watching her brothers trot happily off to Cambridge and Oxford. Conway proposed that Woolf’s feelings of inferiority – well documented in her journals and letters – surface in her work as controlled anger, and are an invaluable part of its enduring effect.
This suggestion doesn’t shock me. What shocks me is the way Woolf has the ability to make it all so funny. A Room of One’s Own is a non-stop sarcastic metafiction that you can’t help but giggle through. But when you think of its ultimate argument – that women suffer unnecessarily from a lack of access – your laughter freezes uneasy in the air and you become acutely aware of how unfunny and justifiable her anger is.
Saturday, June 7, 2003
The most remarkable moment of the conference occurred this morning during Lyndall Gordon’s plenary session, entitled ‘This Loose Drifting Material of Life: Virginia Woolf and Biography.’ Gordon, a renowned biographer, discussed with a great deal of wit and humor the discrepancies in writing biography and the choices biographers must make with the knowledge that they will never be able to know the whole truth and therefore never be able to tell it.
The very issue of knowing humanity was big for Woolf as well. To me, that is what runs beneath all her novels, essays, diaries, and letters – how do we know someone and how do we know life? It would seem that life ends with death but, as Gordon said, ‘That really remains to be seen.’
I wish that Woolf had traveled more often than she did, which was really almost not at all: a few trips to Venice, a trip to Wales. She had every reason to travel; she had the means and opportunity yet she lacked the desire to ever leave London. Of all the modernist writers she was without a doubt the most insular, and it had its effects on her writing – although I cannot support whether they were for better or worse. But just think: If her one trip to Wales could inspire a story as moving as To the Lighthouse, imagine what stories she might have produced as a world traveler.
Next on the itinerary for today is Lyman Conservatory for a botanical perspective on Woolf: namely Kew Gardens and Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst.
Last night one of the members of the Virginia Woolf Society came to dinner dressed as Sally Seton from Mrs. Dalloway. Her iridescent mauve dress was fabulous, but I wasn’t sure if the gigantic pink ribbon bowed around her head was for decor or nursing a head wound. Nonetheless she’s a potential delegate for WoolfCon 2004!
Sunday, June 8, 2003
Last night I met Hermione Lee, Woolf’s greatest biographer. She’s quite charming and much more normal than I expected. After all, it’s no secret that Virginia Woolf attracts more than her fair share of kooks.
This afternoon I got the chance to stand directly in front of Woolf’s writing desk. It’s part of the ‘Vanessa Bell and Bloomsbury’ exhibit in the art museum. The top surface of the desk bears an image of Clio, the muse of history, as painted by Virginia’s nephew, Quentin Bell. Beside the portrait remain countless deep grooves and ink splotches, perhaps the leftovers from many days into evenings of writing.
The conference sessions concluded this afternoon and I am, for the most part, glad. There is only so much of any author, even a beloved one, that I can stomach. Writer-conference worst nightmare: Nathaniel Hawthorne or anything having to do with Transcendentalism. Or, dear god – Tennyson!
So then what makes Woolf a writer-conference fantasy? For one, she’s not very easy to read – she’s not inaccessible by any stroke of the pen – but she makes you work hard, which makes the results that much more rewarding. But the greatest reason, for me at least, is because you can never be done with her. With metaphors that are never one-to-one ratios and a style that reads like a mind’s eye rendering the world, you don’t wish to be done either. T.S. Eliot describes her writing as ‘the dislocation of language into meaning.’ I figure it’s even simpler than that though.
For dinner tonight I had cereal and tea, rather a jump from the ‘Boeuf en Daube’ conference dinner modeled after the famous meal from To the Lighthouse. Most delegates are probably still on planes, waiting to arrive home after five days of thinking, reading, and talking nothing but Virginia Woolf. Not me, though: It’s so nice to have a sublet just down the street from campus. It’s also nice to be thinking and reading something besides Woolf tonight before bed.
Although I’m sure something or other of hers will find its way to my nightstand in no time at all.
—Published June 18, 2003
